Chris Cohen has played with a series of high-profile indie acts, including Haunted Graffiti, Cass McCombs, and Deerhoof, and Overgrown Path, his first solo album, has the unified feel of a stash of songs that he's been sitting on for years. Sunlit, pastoral, and serenely strange, it feels like something unearthed by an enterprising reissue label like Light in the Attic, rather than a brand-new record on Captured Tracks. It's a gentle listen-- the snare drum doesn't receive a lot of attention, and is tapped rather than struck when it does. The pace never ventures beyond mid tempo. But as a whole, it glows with easy comfort, and its wistfulness deepens with repeated listens.
Like his former bandleader Ariel Pink, Cohen bends the reality of his pop-culture references so that his music both begs for and resists carbon-dating. Overgrown Path is pleasingly blurry on just where and when it's supposed to feel beamed from: Does it feel like a singer-songwriter record from the 1970s? Some lost psychedelic-era curiosity? Village Green-era Kinks? A forgotten 1980s jangle-rock band? At various points, I felt certain of each. But unlike Pink, Cohen isn't out to discomfort or unsettle you: He mostly just wants to build a soothing space away from the world for a while, a place where head can breathe and his loneliness can find some room to expand. The time-warp in his music is just a way to cover his tracks.
In fact, Overgrown Path is made of only comforting sounds: cracked, spidery guitars, grand pianos, reverb haze, and Cohen's little Ray Davies croon. Cohen's voice is frail, but uncommonly beautiful, and capable of reaching into a weightless falsetto. The album's title, which suggests cozy remoteness, a time-neglected spot worth rediscovering, strongly reinforces this vibe: This is music to get lost to. Listening to its nine songs on repeat, I was strongly hit with the urge to pad around my home in socks, maybe brew some tea.
Cohen recorded nearly all the instruments parts alone in rural Vermont, and, as a musician, he has extraordinary rapport with himself. The loose Ringo-like tumble of the drum fills on "Caller No.99", its stair-step bassline, the drowsy tangle of wah-wah'ed and clean-toned guitars-- the elements fall into place so easily that it just feels like the dynamic of an expert, veteran band. The fact that it's all Cohen speaks volumes. "Monad" opens in arresting harmonic limbo, a soup of pedal-steeped piano and an uneasily questioning bassline, before easing into smoother, jazzy AM-pop territory. The transition feels like an exhalation.
As frontman to his one-man band, Cohen has a gentle, lost soul's sad-eyed presence: "Peace in life I try to find/ It eludes me another time," he sings on "Open Theme", in a croon so tender it could soothe a colicky newborn. The chorus is a lament about directionlessness that feels dredged from an old folk ballad: "I have pushed a broken wheel." Similarly, "Don't Look Today" pines for "some place you couldn't get to." Cohen crossed the country, from L.A. to Vermont, to record this music of dislocation, and Overgrown Path is darkened with small shadows that suggest a hard-won peace of mind. On "Solitude", he sings: "Sunrise, sunset/ Where I am at this moment/ Is the same as yesterday/ I travel out and the life is so different/ No shadows in the way." Cohen might have made the album for himself as a keepsake, an antidote to the rest of life's pressing noise. It works that way for us, as well.
